Life Orientation — An Important but Neglected School Subject
The name holds so much promise. It is meant to encompass what the syllabus aims to achieve in the souls and minds of every school learner. Life Orientation’s (LO) dream is to promote self-awareness, respect for oneself and others, spark ambition and common decency to all school-going children in the “new South Africa”.
Such a subject like this belongs in the curriculum of every school district/authority/whatever in existence; it is important to a child’s personal development. Knowing this, it was upsetting to find out that the South African government, via the Department of Basic Education is going to relegate LO, after more than 10 years of increasing neglect and irrelevance.
The reason why
When my country made the monumental (but trying) transition from a society strangled by a white nationalist apartheid state to one hoping to be fed and nurtured by the new dawn promised of democracy, a lot of things had to change. Education, one important aspect of society, was in need of an overhaul.
We all know the most oppressive systems wield their power best by separating citizens based on arbitrary differences, so the first thing we had to do was to de-segregate our schools and tear down the laws that allowed this discriminatory and mentally violent behaviour (i.e. Bantu Education Act of 1953).
The next thing was quite ambitious but necessary, given South Africa’s very recent history. South African children going to school between the 1980s and early 1990s had probably grown up with prejudices and biases passed down from their parents. I’m sure it was known that if this wasn’t addressed, the racial integration of schools would be as effective as applying bandages to affix an amputated limb back to its parent body.
In doing my research around LO, I didn’t find much that pointed to why the subject was born but I’ll deduce that it was part of the many transitory measures to make sure that the new democracy served all citizens and the much-feared unrest would not occur. It’s difficult as hell to try and teach whole adults, so you might as well start with the children.
The promises
LO was born in the late 1990s as a child of the now-defunct Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) curriculum. According to section 2.1 of the National Curriculum Statement, LO is:
“… central to the holistic development of learners… Life Orientation guides and prepares learners for life and its possibilities and equips them for meaningful and successful living in a rapidly changing and transforming society. (LO aims to) guide learners to make informed decisions about their health, environment, subject choices, further studies and careers.”
The National Curriculum Statement amended in January 2012, lists the topics encompassing LO’s syllabus for Grades 10 to 12, as follows:
1. Development of the self in society
2. Social and environmental responsibility
3. Democracy and human rights
4. Careers and career choices
5. Study skills
6. Physical education
LO is meant to teach learners about social issues pertinent to their lives as South African citizens, help them navigate their youth and coming adult years in healthy ways, teach them to be aware and accepting of other cultures existent in South Africa besides their own, and allow them to explore all the career opportunities available to them in the new South Africa, where you should be allowed to pursue whatever vocation you wanted, regardless of your race and upbringing. The objectives I’ve mentioned are not exhaustive, but just a summary of what the subject has meant to me.
This sounds attractive and LO seems to be a holistic way of helping learners to up their personal development, however, the truth of what the subject is in classrooms, learners’ and parents’ perceptions of it and how it is taught are a little disappointing.
The most successful yet least appreciated subject
Life Orientation is a subject that I’m sure has the most consistent and highest pass rate in all South African schools. This is due to the “no shit, Sherlock” nature of how it is taught in the classrooms, however. Of course, it’s not being laid to waste across the board — there are schools who have dedicated teachers that try to get learners interested in LO, but more often, there are teachers who are demotivated by their learners’ enthusiasm towards it.
In my current job, I coordinate community projects so that my employer can appear as a corporate citizen. My employer has poured beaucoup money into the skills development of a secondary school in one of the major townships in Gauteng, and I was privy to the school’s 2018 Grade 12 pass rates. LO earned a 100 per cent pass rate — not surprising. It is an easy subject to pass because it calls on common sense, which you’ll find a lot of learners have but sometimes fail to utilise in their personal lives. I’m speaking from experience.
If you manage to fail LO, then that means the most you did was write your name on the exam paper then proceeded to use the paper as a mat on which you laid your feet so you could clip your toenails.
LO and Me
As a younger child aged 8, I was still far from feeling jaded about school and I embraced LO because I was actually learning something I hadn’t known before. A piece of my moral compass was formed from this first exposure and I’m grateful. Life took off when my father got a posting to Hong Kong at the South African Consulate-General’s office there, so our family packed up and left South Africa, and I lost touch with LO.
I returned to South African schooling four years later, in 2006, I caught up on what I missed and soon realised that the LO syllabus did not change much as learners got older. Maybe they’d start learning about sex, drugs and alcohol abuse, career choices as well, but the rest was still the same. I realised that I knew enough to skate by and get a good grade, so I stopped getting involved in class discussions (if there were any) and used my class time for personal reading and to listen to music on my Samsung E250 slide-up phone.
From Grade 10 onwards, I didn’t even register LO, I can’t remember if it was still there. Not like it would matter, because Dad’s work called: we were flying out again. This time, to Belgium.
I swear… we were racking up more miles than the Little Einsteins.
Despite my growing ennui towards the subject in my secondary years, I still knew that it was important to every young person’s education. What I didn’t know or understand was why our national government was not doing much to develop the subject from the inside and allowing more textbooks to be printed, containing varied and irrelevant information.
Ideally, the syllabus should undergo very frequent revisions in order to keep up with this wild world we live in, but I don’t expect that much from them.
The study
Anne Karstens Jacobs, a lecturer at North-West University, published a study in 2011, the first of its kind, which sought to measure the effectiveness and relevance of LO in South African schools, by looking at what the learners — the beneficiaries of this knowledge — thought about it. She conducted her study at several schools in the North West province, speaking to learners of varying income classes and education levels, to discover their perception of the subject and what they knew of its purpose in their curriculum.
A majority of the learners interviewed had a vague understanding of LO — “So basically LO teaches us about life, things that happen in our lives, and stuff like that” (Jacobs 215). Some even noted that they didn’t gain any knowledge or insight from the subject and that the information was taught was such that they already knew, and they did not see it as helpful.
The next thing Jacobs and her colleagues asked the learners was if they enjoyed LO and to specify what they enjoyed about it. Those who were positive about LO couldn’t expand on what they liked about it. The interviews also endured obstacles with most of the black learners not being so forthcoming about their true opinions. Jacobs attributed this to her being speaking to them (black children) as a white woman — perhaps they had thought speaking positively about LO was what she wanted to hear (Jacobs 216)
In one instance, further probing to get the learners to open up revealed that there were nonchalance and disregard towards LO, which is understandable. One learner noted that some of her fellow classmates did not like the subjects because they engaged in the risky activities (e.g. unprotected sex, alcohol and drug abuse) that the teachings of LO advise learners against. For those who wholeheartedly noted that they liked LO, it seemed to be because the hours which were devoted to LO learning during the week were seen as ‘free periods’ and an opportunity to blow off steam instead of learning.
From interviews with learners from the more privileged schools involved in the study, Jacobs learned that these learners saw LO as a waste of time. What’s harrowing is what some learners said to qualify this opinion — they had said LO was meant for children from rural areas who they perceived as not knowing how to behave or “know about hygiene and so on”, or did not have parents to teach them these life skills (Jacobs 218).
A few learners said that they liked LO for what it actually taught them: how to deal with stress, to avoid and rebuff peer pressure, and to take care of their physical health.
When it came to finding out what learners could apply from LO to their actual lives, most of the learners noted physical exercise as the most relevant, and career guidance coming in second (Jacobs 219). These are only two out of the six topics learners are supposed to cover throughout their whole school career.
The problems
The work required to pass LO is light, but that does not make it a fun or engaging subject to learn. Most of the time, learners do not take anything away from it, except for the knowledge they need to just pass the exams. I will not speak for anyone else but LO is not taken seriously by learners and teachers. The subject matter is puddle-deep, you’d only need your most bare common sense to pass the paper, and in-class discussions seldom get to the teeth of the real and sometimes relevant topics.
Out of date, out of touch
I do not have the time to skim all the textbooks published as instructional and learning aids for LO, but I had a fear that the new problems facing kids aged 12–18 are not discussed in them or in class. When I was eleven years old — my mother wasn’t feeling Hong Kong so she brought me and my sisters back to South Africa, and I stayed with them for under a year before going back to HK — I remember sitting in the library with my classmates, watching an AIDS awareness video geared towards youths, and wondering “What the fuck.”
The video was made in the late 1990s, and that was Problem #1 for me. The young people shown in the video had to have graduated from university by the time we pre-teens were viewing it. It may have only been 2004 but the youth of South Africa was moving away from what the youth of, say, 1997 was. The video had a song so steeped in the 90s, that we all cringed and laughed. Concentration was gone and the intended purpose of the informative video was lost.
Two years ago, my then-12-year-old sister enrolled at the same school I attended in 2006. I was in her room one day and found a textbook that I mistook as one of my old ones and assumed it became a hand-me-down. She informed me that the textbook was prescribed by the school for her to use in LO. The textbook still had the same people on its cover, same font and lettering as the one I took with me in Grade 8.
Ten years. A lot can happen and change in ten years, but it seemed that the school, a private one may I add, did not think that LO would be in need of much updating for Grade 8 learners between 2006 and 2017.
Gaps in the learning
For as much as LO’s topics are important for every child to learn, there are many things that kids, especially teenagers, can learn before they venture into their adult lives that LO does not account for.
There’s a lot in life to prepare the kids for, this much I know in Quarter 3 of my 20’s. Things like budgeting, how taxes work, the importance of saving, managing your platonic and romantic relationships in a healthy way are all things I wish were pressed into me at school. The financial stuff, however, was expounded in another subject called Economics and Management Studies (EMS), but I think teenagers would’ve seen the relevance of such skills in their lives if it were mentioned in LO, too.
Kids already don’t believe that what they learn in school can be useful to them once they become adults, so if you place important financial lessons in a subject that is regarded with the same despair as Maths, they won’t try to internalise it. It becomes only good enough to ensure they can pass their exams, then it’s forgotten after.
Of course, schools can’t be relied on to give kids the education they deserve; parents have to do their part, too. But as is the case of South Africa, many black kids grew up in households where finances were strained and the only financial moves their parents knew how to make were to ensure no one went hungry or wasn’t able to go to school. Things like investment options, financing your house or car, the act of putting money away for a rainy day, or filing insurance policies so the family isn’t put out when the breadwinner dies don’t get touched on until we’re well into our adult years.
The relegation
As if the wider society didn’t take LO seriously, the subject will now be taking a backseat to History, which will become compulsory post-Grade 10 (when learners will have had to make their subject choices for Matric) in 3 years.
The Minister for the Department of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga was quoted as saying, at the launch of a report to announce this new development:
“The history curriculum must include the last bid attempt at the decolonisation of the African mind. We must, without any apology, remove the vestiges of apartheid’s sanitised version of history. We must do so without airbrushing the actual story of the apartheid past — nor must we glorify the liberation movements presenting themselves as an equivalent of moral virtue,”
If you can swerve around all the buzzwords, the above quote assumes that asides from making History compulsory, the curriculum will be amended to become more Afrocentric. I can assume that there was no malice behind the decision to make History take Life Orientation’s place on the compulsory roster; it is important for kids to grow up knowing about the history of our country (as well as other African countries) because a lot of youth really do not know the full story of South Africa in the 20th century.
When I was studying History in Grade 8, the topic was colonial empires and settlers. In Grade 9, it was then about the 2 World Wars, and only in Grade 10, we touched on apartheid in South Africa. Thinking about it now, learning European history as South Africans makes little sense when we have such a tumultuous history that is seen as a bygone era, when in fact we’ve only just walked out of the door of the apartheid regime (24 years may sound like a lot of time, but it’s merely a second compared to the centuries between 1654 and 1994.).
It is not clear why Life Orientation has to lose out when it can undergo the same reupholstering that it looks like History is going to receive. With LO becoming optional and a subject that learners can drop when they make their subject choices in Grade 10, it could create the impression that it’s not important to a burgeoning young adult’s life.
Perhaps the decision to relegate LO was due to the department sensing the dissatisfaction on the part of learners and teachers with the state of the subject’s curriculum. Whatever the reason, it’s disappointing, but I’m not surprised. I’ve known my own government to take the easier, less costly path to resolve important issues, meanwhile, they plan to spend countless millions of Rands to rename yet another series of roads and interchanges, under the guise of erasing the legacy of apartheid bigwigs.
I mean, I guess…
Most of the things that LO was supposed to teach me, I learned from interacting with other people and hearing their thoughts — which social media has helped with, to deliver one’s opinions right to your fingertips — and I think for the children coming up, they’ll have their moral compass shaped by the people closest to them and those they look up to in lieu of paying attention during LO lessons. We can only hope current adults can be if not good role models then aware of their role in society to pass down wisdom to the younger ones and execute that role responsibly.
I’m far from a perfect person and there are times when I think I’ve not made much of my life but as a mother of one and the eldest of four siblings, I still have to guide and steer. My siblings have their own lives and I can’t be responsible for the choices they make — my mother would beg to differ — but I can’t act like they don’t look up to me or use me as a template.
By the time my son is old enough to be paying attention to what he’s taught in Life Orientation, I can’t imagine what the curriculum will look like and rather than leave it up to LO, I think it’s a safer option to impart on him what I can so he can grow up to become well-rounded and happy and most definitely not what anybody would be calling a “fuckboy”.
Looking at him now as a high-energy, high-metabolism, “Welcome to Wakanda!”-yelling 5-year-old who doesn’t understand why he can’t play on Grandma’s Kindle ALL DAY… I have my work cut out for me.
